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France to allow stimulation work for EGS projects

France to allow stimulation work for EGS projects Installation at Soultz geothermal plant, France (source: soultz.net)
Alexander Richter 26 Apr 2013

The recent decision to allow stimulation for EGS projects in France despite a bann on fracking for natural gas development, will be part of the discussions of the upcoming International Conference on EGS in Potsdam, May 27. 2013

President Francois Hollande and the French government want to reduce the dependence on nuclear power and therefore support electricity production from geothermal heat. According to Bloomberg the Head of the Energy Division in the Ministry for the Environment, Pierre-Marie Abadie, announced earlier this month that stimulation for Enhanced Geothermal Systems is different from fracking for the Shale Gas exploitation and therefore will be allowed furthermore. Just in February the French government awarded two licenses for the geothermal exploration and 18 more are in work, among them four licenses in the Alsace. This has created strong criticism by companies wanting to do fracking for natural gas, as reported by ThinkGeoEnergy before.

In news reported here, the country recently gave out exploration permits for geothermal projects with an EGS element.

With this announcement, the French Government took one step beyond, where other governments are still hesitating in supporting the more environmentally safe EGS-technology. The German Government is also highly interested in this kind of geothermal heat usage. Its Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety is therefore funding an International Conference on EGS (ICEGS 2013), which takes place on May 27th in Potsdam, Germany.

The event, supported by GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, offers an international high-calibre program to discuss about the application of Stimulation and will show the state of the development of stimulation jobs in the past, the present and in the future.

Well-known speakers from the USA, Australia, China, Japan as well as Germany and Switzerland will come to Potsdam to talk about their experiences and their projects.

Among the speakers are Eva Schill (GEIE), Steven Hickman (USGS), Prof. Dr. Hiroshi Asanuma (Tohoku University), Zhonghe Pang (Chinese Acadamy of Science in Bejing), Peter Rose (University of Utah), Torsten Tischner (BGR), Jan-Diederik van-Wees (TNO-NITG), Stefan Wiemer (ETH Zürich). Among the introduced projects are Berlín in San Salvador, Genesys in Germany, Soultz-sous-Forêts in France, Desert Peak and Newberry in the USA and Habanero in Australia.

This comprehensive overview is accompanied by practical experiences in field trips to the EGS-projects in Groß-Schoenebeck and Soultz-sous-Forêts. The conference programme, further information and registration possibilities you find on www.icegs.eu.

Source: Enerchange